Biological Dispositions & Limits Flashcards
How can physical characteristics effect learning?
Differences in vocal chords- humans and chimps have different vocal chords and therefore can’t communicate and that limts our understanding and learning
How can the fact we can’t inherit behaviours effect learning?
The benefits we get from learning are specific to us and don’t include behaviours e.g. making a spear out of wood because that would be redundant for us
How can the environment effect learning?
- Neurotoxins
- Malnutrition
- Head injury
- Other neurological damage
How can critical periods effect learning?
Life stages that are considered optimal for learning to occur. If we don’t learn at these times it can be difficult for us to learn later e.g. language
what is prepardness & conditioning? what are some examples?
An innate biological tendency to learn certain types of
associations more easily
Taste aversion and fear conditioning are examples
What was the study done on fear conditioning in rats?
• Garcia & Koelling (1966)
• Rats trained to drink water from a tube
• During drinking exposed to two types of CSs
- Saccharine water
- Bright light + noise (click)
•Exposed to one of two conditions
- Electric shock
- Radiation via Xrays
Test
• Half the rats from each group allowed to drink saccharine water
• Half the rats from each group allowed to drink plain water paired with the audio-visual compound
What did the rat study by Garcia & Koelling show?
Garcia and Koelling noticed the laboratory rats started to avoid drinking the water from plastic bottles in the radiation chambers. Realizing the rats might be associating the plastic-tasting water with the sickness experienced from radiation, the researchers designed an experiment to test their hypothesis.
Garcia and Koelling gave three groups of rats’ high, medium, or low doses of radiation after the rats drank sweetened water. The higher the dose of radiation, the sicker the rats became. As you might predict, the rats that received the highest doses of radiation strongly associated the sweetened water with the illness following the radiation. The majority of those rats later refused to drink sweetened water.
How does prepadness influence the rat’s behaviour?
Evolutionary relevance of prepared associations
• Nausea more likely from ingested material
• Pain more likely with stimulus that can be seen or heard
How do prepardness and OC relate?
Biological dispositions in pigeon avoidance responses
• Pigeons can easily be trained to fly to another perch to avoid a shock
• Pigeons cannot easily be trained to peck a key/disk to avoid a shock
• It seems that some behaviours are naturally associated
with certain types of need
What did Bolles find regarding prepardness & OC?
- Preparedness plays an important role in avoidance behaviour
- Avoidance responses are not operants but rather elicited behaviours (controlled by stimuli that precede them)
- Aversive stimuli elicit SSDRs (species-specific defense reaction)
Example:
A rat’s natural reaction to fear is to freeze or to run and these behaviours are naturally elicited. In a Skinner box a rat will often freeze when a shock is signalled. If a rat experiences fear in a confined space where it cannot
escape its best defense is to freeze.
what is instinctive drift?
• When a classically conditioned behaviour pattern interferes
with an operant behaviour that was being reinforced.
• Breland & Breland (1961)
• Trying to train a racoon to deposit a wooden coin in a piggy
bank.
• Early conditioning was successful
• BUT… the racoon started rubbing the coin in its paws and
stopped depositing the coin in the bank.
• The racoon had associated the coin with food and a naturally
elicited behaviour took over.
What is sign tracking?
When an organism approaches a stimulus that signals the presentation of an appetitive event
e.g. bell becomes so strongly associated with food the dog thinks the light will prepare the food
What is adjunctive behaviour?
• An excessive pattern of behaviour that emerges as a byproduct of an intermittent schedule of reinforcement for some other behaviour.
Falk (1961)
• Rats trained to press a lever for food on intermittent schedule drank excessive amounts of water
• 3hr session – drank 3x more than usual for an entire day
• Rats were food deprived NOT water deprived
• Studies typically employ FI schedules
• Adjunctive behaviour develops in the period between instances of reinforcement
List some adjunctive behaviours
- Licking
- Chewing
- Aggression
- Eating
- Nail biting
- Talking
- Drug use
- Alcohol consumption
what are the characteristics of adjunctive behaviours?
• Occur immediately
• Are affected by deprivation
• greater deprivation = stronger adjunctive behaviour
• Can function as reinforcers
• Optimal interval between reinforcers and the development of
adjunctive behaviour
